When you take a writing workshop, you are not allowed to speak when your work is being critiqued. This is the first law of the workshop. The idea behind it is simple: you can’t listen if you’re yapping. I actually think the rule of silence protects you from making an ass out of yourself. It prevents you from saying things like: what I was trying to do, what I meant was, it actually happened that way, etc. The only reason to get feedback, as far as I can tell, is to see if you got on base. Did you smack one out there? Some people at the workshop are intent on showing off, some are out to get you out of jealousy, and some are as thick as root vegetables.
What’s the worst or meanest piece of feedback you’ve ever received? Mine was when an esteemed professor asked me I wanted to be the Fran Lebowitz of the poetry world. I know he meant it as an insult, but I sort of took it as a compliment.
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Hi Besty,
I thought about blogging for a year before I tried it. Every time I brought it up, my husband reminded me that it might not be a great idea given my ICP (impulse control problems). It’s been two years, one month and eight days and I’ve been as quiet as a kitten, as well behaved as a first grade girl in a plaid jumper. And I’m fuckin’ sick of it. I want to break it down. I want to drop it. Stomp it. Eat it. Fuck it. But I can’t. I mean: I can’t. Do you know what I’m talking about? Am I in the audience or am I on the screen? Are these my hands, folded, waiting for my carton of chocolate milk? I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t know it was a go fuck yourself zone. Pocket book. Pocket book. Sweet pocket book. Your parents are dead. Lower your standards. Raise high the roof beam. Our soup today is lobster bisque. Send it back. I can’t. I can’t. This is what I’m trying to tell you. Can a tiger change her spots? You made your bed, now lie to me. I want to pull rolls of paper through my body. I wrote you a letter in 1997. Did you sleep with the teacher? Did you eat grilled cheeses? Why can’t you really write?
Sometimes editing a book is a ratfuck. You keep chasing something through a maze that no longer leads anywhere. It’s a sand trap. The canary’s last song in a forsaken mine. And sometimes editing a book is like making love to an ordinary woman or doing algebra. No one ever tells you how slow it is, how 5-10 pages an hour is a clip. Like therapy or sex: are you even doing it right? What goes on behind closed doors? It’s about attention. It’s about asking every question. It’s about having a feel for the fabric. It requires an innate sense of structure, an eye for the telling detail, a finely tuned sense of syntax, tense, rhythm. I think being an editor is most like being a tailor. Take it in, move the button, hem the sleeve. How handsome you look in the mirror. How trim.
Just got home from my event at McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho. A finer establishment you couldn’t hope for. On the way back, I polished off two mini Charleston Chews and two mini Peppermint Pattys. I ate one of the Pattys so fast that I nearly choked, although this did not stop me from stuffing one of the Chews in my face while I was choking. At which point, I started coughing so hard that my right arm fell off and I peed myself slightly.
This Monday night, January 17, I’ll be at 
When I was fifteen, I went to an arts camp and developed an enormous crush on a guy until we got into a huge fight about what was more important: the authenticity of the feeling in a poem or the craft. He was for feeling; I was for craft. Feelings shmeelings. Everyone has feelings. I count on artists and writers to put those feelings into exquisite form, whatever that form and style may take. I want an author to be in control so I don’t have to worry. Of course I want to moved. We all want to be swept away, dazzled and destroyed. But the only way to slay me is with great craft. A perfect adjective can move me more than a whole megillah. Bleeders need not apply. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in love with my feelings, I’m just saying they don’t equal good writing.
I’m enough of an asshole to imagine that someday an intrepid graduate student will track me down in the Jewish Home for the Aged and want to see some of my client files. We’ll look through them together and I’ll tell unforgettable tales about publishing in the olden days. The student will marvel at the long editorial letters, the rejection letters, the christmas cards with pictures of the author’s three children in the Bahamas. Contracts, royalty statements, reviews and remainder notices will tell another tale. The ups and downs of a long publishing life.
The last time I was on an agents’ panel, a man asked how we knew which editors to send our projects to. No one had ever asked that simple question. The answer is lunch. A decade of having lunch with editors to get to know them, their taste, what they’re looking for. We’re talking a lot of sushi.
Betsy Lerner 